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We thought we’d escaped the worst effects of the latest cold spell to grip these emerald isles. In December, ten days of sub-zero temperatures left the lake on which our houseboat floats frozen. [...]

I’ve started off the new year with a close and thorough examination of a list of the four hundred plus literary agents of the United Kingdom – in search of one who’d love to represent an [...]

All About Writing, in association with Pan Macmillan, invites you to join Tony Park and Jo-Anne Richards, two novelists from opposite sides of the world, as they meet on the common ground of [...]

I’ve been experimenting with my friendly AI assistant– ChatGPT who I introduced last week. It/he/she has very obvious limitations, but it also takes the initiative in sometimes surprising ways. I [...]

An article in the New York Times alerted me to an existential threat confronting all writers. It’s an artificial intelligence construct called ChatGPT. The NYT calls it “quite simply, the best [...]

“I’m in London in a hotel listening to a couple behind me about to embark on an affair. It’s very exciting. I noted him putting his wedding ring in his pocket in the elevator on the way back from [...]

All About Writing’s latest flash fiction challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2750 / £ 150 or a voucher to the same value to use on one of our [...]

How do you communicate a character’s sense that someone they’ve encountered is somehow “off”, not right, not to be trusted, possibly even homicidal? The question arose during a discussion [...]

Science tells us that at the normal speeds at which we live our lives, time passes as the clock ticks – at an invariable rate. At our velocity approaching the speed of light, Einstein said, time [...]

I have a list of words that I know but have never used, certainly, never written. One of them is “threnody” – which means, as I understand it, a poem or a song of lamentation – especially for the [...]

When I was younger – but not in any sense a youth – I devoured what are now called Young Adult novels. I hate the term, because, among other things, some books categorised as YA deserve a much [...]

Writing is a serious business, wouldn’t you say? It requires that you shed your defences and dig down deep to mine seams of memory and emotion. It requires that you attempt the virtually [...]